New Testament

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The New Testament is the second part of the Christian Bible: a collection of twenty-seven short works, written in Greek, that the church came to hold as scripture beside the Jewish writings it calls the Old Testament. The name itself states a claim — testament renders the Greek diathēkē, covenant — that these books record a new covenant between God and humanity, fulfilling and not discarding the old. The phrase is not a librarian’s label fastened on from outside; it is a confession. To open the collection under that title is already to read the death and rising of Jesus as the hinge on which the older covenant turns into a new one, and to read the older books in its light.

The shape of the collection

The contents fall into recognizable kinds. Four gospels narrate the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth; the Acts of the Apostles continues the story into the early movement, tracing the gospel from Jerusalem to Rome and giving Paul the central place in its second half. Then come the letters — thirteen carrying the name of Paul, a further set ascribed to figures such as Peter, James, John, and Jude — written to particular congregations about particular problems, and only later read as universal doctrine. The collection ends with the Revelation, a visionary account of the end of the age delivered as a letter to seven churches and unfolding in seals, trumpets, and bowls toward a new heaven and a new earth.

Each of the four gospels is its own portrait. Matthew frames Jesus as the teacher of a new law, gathering his words into five great discourses and binding the story at every turn to the Hebrew prophets. Mark, the shortest and most abrupt, drives toward the cross with a hard urgency and an air of secrecy about who Jesus is. Luke, the most polished writer, opens the story toward the poor, the outsider, and the gentile, and carries his single narrative across into Acts. John stands apart from the other three: later, slower, more meditative, it frames Jesus less as the teller of parables than as the eternal Word made flesh, the light that the darkness did not overcome. The first three resemble one another so closely in wording and order that they are read side by side and called the synoptics — “seen together” — while the fourth keeps its own key.

The letters are the oldest layer of the whole. They are occasional writings, struck off for a moment and a place: a quarrel at Corinth, a crisis over the Law in Galatia, a runaway slave, a collection for the poor of Jerusalem. Out of those local emergencies came the first sustained Christian theology — of grace, of the body of Christ, of the death and resurrection as the saving act — set down before any gospel was written. The seven catholic, or general, epistles (James, the two of Peter, the three of John, and Jude) address the church at large rather than a single town, and tend to matters of conduct, false teaching, and endurance.

When the books were written

Scholarship dates the earliest of these writings, several of Paul’s letters, to roughly the 50s of the first century, within a generation of the crucifixion; the first letter to the Thessalonians is often placed earliest, around the year 50, which makes a letter, not a gospel, the oldest Christian document that survives. The gospels followed across the later first century — Mark commonly set around the years 65 to 75, Matthew and Luke a decade or two after, John toward the century’s close — and a few of the shorter works, the second letter of Peter chief among them, perhaps into the second century. The order in which the books were written runs almost backward to the order in which they stand: the letters that close the volume were composed first, and the gospels that open it look back on events already a generation gone, remembered, shaped, and confessed before they were narrated.

The authorship of much of the collection is among the most worked-over questions in the field. The gospels are formally anonymous; the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are second-century attributions, traditional rather than signed. Of the thirteen letters bearing Paul’s name, seven command a near-universal consensus as his own — Romans, the two Corinthian letters, Galatians, Philippians, the first to the Thessalonians, and the short note to Philemon. The remaining six are disputed in varying degrees: Ephesians, Colossians, and the second to the Thessalonians divide opinion, while the three pastoral letters — the two to Timothy and the one to Titus — are widely judged to come from a later hand writing in Paul’s name, a practice the ancient world did not regard as Paul’s age regarded it. The letter to the Hebrews, anonymous and unlike Paul in style, was already recognized in antiquity as not his; Origen remarked that who actually wrote it God alone knew.

The synoptic problem

That the first three gospels overlap so closely raises a literary question with no fully settled answer. The dominant solution holds that Mark was written first and that Matthew and Luke each used it, supplementing it from a further source — a lost collection of the sayings of Jesus that scholars, since the nineteenth century, label Q, from the German Quelle, “source.” This two-source account, proposed in its essentials by Christian Hermann Weisse in 1838 and given its classic four-document form by Burnett Hillman Streeter in 1924, carried the field for most of the twentieth century. It has competitors. The Farrer hypothesis, argued by Austin Farrer in 1955 and pressed by later scholars, keeps Markan priority but dispenses with Q, holding that Luke simply used Matthew. An older view revived by William Farmer in 1964, descending from Johann Jakob Griesbach in 1776, reverses the order and makes Matthew first and Mark a later abridgment. The debate turns on patterns of agreement too fine to settle from outside the text, and no one solution has carried the whole field.

How the canon was drawn

There was no New Testament at the start, only writings in circulation. Which of them counted as scripture was settled slowly and unevenly over the first four centuries, by use and argument far more than by decree. The earliest fixed Christian list on record is not the church’s but a dissident’s: in the 140s Marcion of Sinope, holding the Creator of the Hebrew Scriptures to be a lesser god than the Father of Jesus, rejected the Old Testament outright and assembled in its place a single edited gospel and ten letters of Paul. Whether his canon forced the wider church to fix its own is debated; that his list is the first such collection attested is not. Against teachers who used only one gospel or many, Irenaeus around the year 180 insisted that the gospels were four and could be neither more nor fewer, fixing the fourfold shape that held.

A damaged Latin manuscript known as the Muratorian fragment — eighty-five lines surviving in a much later codex, but plausibly translating a Greek list of the late second century — already names most of the present books: the gospels, the Acts, the Pauline letters, Jude and two letters of John, the Revelation, and oddly the Wisdom of Solomon, while allowing an Apocalypse of Peter that some would not read in church and admitting the Shepherd of Hermas only for private use. By the early fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea could sort the writings into three bins — those universally acknowledged, those disputed but widely read, and those rejected as spurious — a snapshot of a canon nearly but not yet closed at the edges. The first list that enumerates exactly the twenty-seven and no others is the thirty-ninth festal letter of Athanasius of Alexandria, sent at Easter in 367; the African councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 ratified the same count for the Latin West.

A handful of books spent centuries at the margin. The disputed writings — the antilegomena — were Hebrews, James, the second of Peter, the second and third of John, Jude, and the Revelation; the Syriac churches long read a New Testament that omitted several of them, and the Greek East hesitated over the Revelation into the fifth century. Other texts pressed at the boundary from the far side and nearly entered: the epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas both stand inside the Codex Sinaiticus, copied as though scripture. The line was drawn by the slow consensus of reading communities, not by a single ruling council, and it was bound up at every step with the question of which teaching was orthodox — a process visible only at a slant in the surviving record, since the canon that won is most of what came down.

The text and the manuscripts

No original of any New Testament book survives; what survives is copies, more of them by far than for any other ancient literature. The Greek witnesses number in the thousands — papyri, the formal uncial books written in capitals, the later minuscules in running hand, and the lectionaries arranged for liturgy — and to these are added the early translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other tongues, and the quotations strewn through the church fathers. The oldest scrap is a credit-card-sized papyrus leaf of John, the Rylands fragment long dated to around the second quarter of the second century, carrying a few verses of the trial before Pilate; the most recent paleography urges a wider second-century range, but it remains the earliest physical trace of the text. The first complete New Testaments are the great fourth-century codices: Sinaiticus, recovered by Constantin von Tischendorf at the monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai in the nineteenth century and holding the whole New Testament entire, and Vaticanus, slightly older and lacking only its final pages, long the chief treasure of the Vatican Library.

Comparison of these witnesses sorts them into textual families. The Alexandrian, attested by Vaticanus and Sinaiticus and the early papyri, is the shortest and generally the earliest, and underlies the modern critical text. The Western, carried above all by the bilingual Codex Bezae, runs longer and freer, paraphrasing and expanding, especially in Acts. The Byzantine, dominant from the ninth century onward and standing behind the printed text that Erasmus edited in 1516 — the Textus Receptus from which the early vernacular Bibles were made — is the smoothed and harmonized form of the majority of late manuscripts. The work of weighing these readings against one another, refined from Tischendorf through Westcott and Hort to the Nestle-Aland editions now standard, is textual criticism; its result is not a single recovered original but a reasoned reconstruction, the verse-by-verse judgment of which words the first writers most likely set down.

The books the canon left out

The four gospels were not the only ones written, nor the thirteen the only letters sent. The first Christian centuries produced a wide further literature — infancy gospels filling the silent childhood, passion and resurrection narratives, acts of individual apostles, apocalypses, and sayings collections — that the forming canon did not receive. The largest single recovery of it came in 1945, when a sealed jar near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt yielded a cache of Coptic codices, the Nag Hammadi library, whose contents reopened a body of writing previously known mostly through the men who wrote to refute it. Among them is the Gospel of Thomas, a string of one hundred and fourteen sayings without birth, miracle, or cross, presenting Jesus as the revealer of a knowledge that wakes the hearer to his own origin in the light.

Much of this excluded material belonged to the currents later named Gnostic, for which salvation came not by belief or obedience but by an inward recognition, and which preserved their own scriptures — later largely lost or buried — over against the church’s. The boundary between received and rejected was real and consequential: to fall outside it was, in the end, not to survive in the Christian mainstream at all. These apocrypha are treated less as failures than as evidence, the trace of roads the early movement did not take, and the standing reminder that the canon was a selection from a larger field and not the whole of it.

What the traditions hold, and how the esoteric read it

For the traditions that receive these books, the stakes are not literary. Christians across their many divisions take the New Testament as revelation, the authoritative witness to Christ, however they differ on the manner of its inspiration, the right way to interpret it, and the church entitled to read it. Islam accords the gospel — the Injil given to Jesus — a qualified honor while holding that the scripture in Christian hands no longer matches what was first revealed; the Qur’an names Jews and Christians People of the Book, and reads the New Testament’s Jesus through its own frame, as prophet and not as God incarnate.

Within the wider esoteric reception the same texts have been read otherwise — for a hidden sense beneath the plain one, an inner gospel addressed to those able to hear it. The Gnostics found in the sayings of Jesus the cipher of a saving self-knowledge; later Christian Kabbalists and Christian mystics worked the prologue of John, the transfiguration, and the visions of the Revelation as charts of an inner ascent, reading the events of the gospel as stages in the soul. This way of reading the church mostly resisted and the heterodox embraced, and it runs as a quiet undercurrent through the whole later history of the text — the conviction that the letter is a veil and that the gospel keeps a second meaning for the few.

The text in scholarship

The modern critical study of the New Testament is two centuries old and vast, and its primary tools are reference works rather than monographs. The standard critical edition of the Greek text is the Novum Testamentum Graece of Eberhard and Erwin Nestle, continued by Kurt and Barbara Aland — the Nestle-Aland, now in its twenty-eighth edition — whose apparatus records the manuscript variants beneath every line. Bruce Metzger’s The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford, 1987) remains the standard history of how the twenty-seven were gathered, and his The Text of the New Testament, revised with Bart Ehrman in its fourth edition (Oxford, 2005), the standard guide to the manuscripts and their families. Kurt and Barbara Aland’s The Text of the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1989) lays out the classification of witnesses on which the critical edition rests. On the figure at the center, E. P. Sanders’s The Historical Figure of Jesus (Penguin, 1993) is a measured account of what the documents will and will not yield.

For the writings the canon excluded, the documentary record is unusually open. The Library hosts the work of G. R. S. Mead, the Theosophical scholar whose turn-of-the-century translations were for a long time the chief English access to the Gnostic literature: his survey Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906), his rendering of the great Coptic dialogue Pistis Sophia (1921), in which the risen Christ instructs his disciples across thirteen aeons, and The Gnostic John the Baptizer, which gathers what the heterodox sources made of the forerunner. These are nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century works, superseded in detail by the critical editions that followed the Nag Hammadi find, yet they remain the readable threshold to the literature the New Testament canon shut out.

What the documents are

What the documents are, set against what later belief made of them, is one of the most worked-over questions in the study of religion. The writings are early, occasional, and human — letters dashed off to settle disputes, remembered teaching shaped into proclamation, a vision sent to churches under pressure, all composed for immediate ends and none for a canon that did not yet exist. The canon is the later judgment that drew a line around twenty-seven of them, ranked them above the rest, and called what lay inside it the word of God. Two things are true together and neither cancels the other: that the books had a history before they had authority, and that the church which gathered them reads them as the testament its name claims — the record of a new covenant, sealed in the death and rising of Christ, which the church still reads as binding.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906) · Mead — Pistis Sophia (1921) · Mead — The Gnostic John the Baptizer

→ Related: Bible · Christianity · Gospel · Paul The Apostle · Gnosis · Qur An · Old Testament · Jesus Christ · Acts Of The Apostles · Apocrypha · Nag Hammadi Library · Marcion Of Sinope